The Skype SDKs and APIs offer a pretty powerful and well-rounded offering when it comes to writing variety of communication solutions. The page here details out the various components of the Skype Developer Platform as well as the Supported Topologies. No point in repeating the content again, although I would like to highlight one important thing…the Skype for Business Online is only supported by the client SDK at the moment; the Skype Web SDK doesn’t support it yet. I find the Skype Web SDK pretty interesting and am waiting eagerly to get my hands on the Office 365 compatible version. Meanwhile here is the FAQ addressing few key points.

This particular requirement was to build an app which will connect to Skype for Business Online and get the required data for further processing and\or reporting purposes. I have a Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2015, downloaded the SDK from here and was all set to go. The only challenge was that each time I tried installing it, it kept giving me this error…

Not sure why it was asking for Visual Studio 2010, one would make a pretty reasonable guess that the installer would contains few DLLs (references to object model & web service APIs), sample code and maybe help docs etc. Of course I was not willing to go back to VS 2010.

A quick search in the community returned couple approaches…

The first one dealt with registry edits, the idea is to export the VS 20XX hive, edit the relevant keys to 2010 and then import it back into registry. This would get by the installer check and go ahead with the installation. It worked for some, but I was not very comfortable with that.

The second approach was to use a tool (like WinRAR or likes) and extract the files from the downloaded exe (lyncsdk.exe). The extracted files in turn would then be used to install the SDK. Bingo! that one worked for me. Extracted the files and picked the correct version (between 32 bit and 64 bit) to install the SDK successfully.

Once the installation is complete, another thing to note is that the samples are located at “%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Office 2013\LyncSDK\samples” (in Windows 10 at least) and NOT over here “%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Lync\SDK\Samples” as indicated in the documentation. The samples have a descent variation to get one started. The sample folder also contains a zipped file by the name microsamples.zip, definitely worth exploring.

Last but not the least, do remember to copy the Project Templates from the install location (%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Office 2013\ProjectTemplates) to the appropriate Visual Studio folder (%userprofile%\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Templates\ProjectTemplates) to ensure the templates are available when you create a new project. There are two categories in there, CSharp & Silverlight. You may choose\copy one or both based on your needs\preferences.